Right before we left for a visit to New York, I went to the Friends of the Library bookstore on a fool’s errand. Maybe, just maybe, a book that I had donated would be there and I could buy it back.
In the year after my husband’s death I thinned out our home library. We periodically culled both books and t-shirts and we had done neither recently. For several months, I schlepped bags and boxes of books to the library of the school where I worked. It was the physical labor of grieving. A few of them were added to collection; the rest were sent to Thrift Books in a scheme that would benefit the library as well as guarantee that the more esoteric books would find new homes. After the librarian was no longer participating in the Thrift Books program, I took books to the main branch of the public library, which has a small bookstore as well as an annual book sale.
If I had thought through the actual likelihood of any of the books I donated still being in the bookstore, I would not have gone. It has been six years since Jim died and four since I delivered the last eight cartons in preparation to move from large house to small apartment.
In the months after he died, I was trying to pare things down, everything, to figure out what was essential, what was mine, and who I was in his absence. How would I ever fit back into 1,000 square feet of space after the complacency and excess of our suburban sprawl — a garage with an extra refrigerator, a butler’s pantry filled with extra dishes, old school supplies and the children’s school portfolios — if I were ever to leave our house, or even contemplate a return to New York, which seemed impossible with dogs and my older daughter. But I had to start somewhere, so I started with the books.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Other Side to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.